"The Biggest Grift in Modern History"

11 May 2025 •

From crypto scams to crony capitalism to pay-to-play tariff deals, Trump and Musk are turning the corruption up to 11.

Throughout his life, Donald Trump has been driven a simple question: "Who can I rip off next?"

From engaging in multimillion-dollar bank fraud to entering into a criminal conspiracy to save a few bucks on sales tax, no crime is too big or too small for Trump.

He'll steal from kids with cancer.

He'll scam seniors and war widows.

He'll even loot his own charity.

Now, as President, he and the Trump Crime Family are engaging in meme coin "pump and dumps" and stock market "poop and scoops" at such a monster scale that they are raking in $1 billion a month in what Scott Galloway tells Anderson Cooper is "the biggest grift in modern history."

As Molly White has been detailing at her Citation Needed website, Trump is seeking to build a "cryptocurrency empire" while simultaneously destroying its regulators.

In addition, reports White, Trump's "crypto-for-access dinner" scheduled for May 22 at Trump’s Virginia golf club has turned into a bonanza of foreign emoluments:

Of the 220 largest holders of Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin currently listed on a public attendee leaderboard, 73% are likely based outside the United States. And among the top 25 “VIP” guests offered additional private access to the president, 23 are likely foreign entities.

According to Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, the fact that Trump is openly "selling access for what are effectively payments directly to him" is, without question, "an impeachable offense."

Making Arabia Great Again

When Trump heads to the Middle East next week, it seems he'll be more interested in his personal family business than in bringing peace to the region.

As other American small business owners brace for the "devastating impact" of Trump tariffs, businessman Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, three states with which he and his family have strong—and rapidly mushrooming—business ties.

During his first term in office, Saudi Arabia helped prop up Trump's US properties when no one else would.

A month before his second inauguration, Trump announced he would be Making Saudi Arabia Great Again with three new, highly lucrative Trump-branded projects.

In April 2025, Trump underscored how important his business relationship with the Kingdom is when he dishonored fallen US troops to attend a Saudi-backed LIV Golf event at one of his golf courses.

The other states on Trump's itinerary — Qatar and the UAE — have also moved quickly to curry favor with the "pay-for-play" Trump regime, announcing massive new crypto investments and a $5.5 billion beachside golf resort.

When Trump attends Saudi Arabia’s ‘MAGA in the Desert’ conference in Riyadh on May 13, he will also be joined by partners-in-crime including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO and Musk's arch-rival in the battle for AI dominance Sam Altman, and the White House AI-and-crypto czar David Sacks, previously best known for playing Elon's "mini-me" on Twitter.

Elon's quest for global—and interplanetary—domination

Even before Elon Musk endorsed Trump in 2024, and then spent nearly $300 million and committed multiple crimes to get him re-elected, I warned that maybe it was not a good idea to let such a drug-addled lunatic to have so much control over our space hard- and software:

It's one thing for an unhinged conspiracy theorist to announce on X that he hates the majority of Americans so much he would battle them "to the death."

It's another thing entirely for that same whack job to be the "genius" running our spy satellites, space ships, and social media algorithms—even as he attempts to create a new, potentially world-controlling superintelligence.

Musk has already embedded his "anti-woke" and sexually deviant Grok AI inside the US government.

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For all his talk of free-speech, Musk still routinely censors political voices at the request of dictators and leaders in countries he does business with.

Finally, though, the mainstream media are catching on to the dangers we face if Elon succeeds in achieving his megalomaniacal ambitions.

In The New York Times on April 30, Julia Angwin detailed the new "Surveillance State" Musk has built in plain sight with little pushback.

Now, in a major article in The Atlantic this week, Ross Anderson describes Starlink as "Elon Musk’s Most Alarming Power Grab," noting that:

If Musk continues to dominate the launches that take satellites to space, and the internet services that operate there, he could end up with more power over the human exchange of information than any previous person has ever enjoyed.

Maybe that's why Saudi Arabia and other Arab states keeping writing multibillion-dollar checks to him.

Musk's government work is less about efficiency, more about thievery.

You might think that stealing all our data and installing his Memphis-polluting* AI into the US government would be enough ROI for one Republican donor.

But Elon Musk isn't just any donor. And he doesn't stop no matter how many times he's told no.

Musk's corporate corruption is now hardwired into the US government.

Since January, the Trump administration has:

Made drastic changes to Biden's $42 billion broadband infrastructure program specifically to benefit Musk's Starlink.
Strong-armed FOUR federal agencies into pushing lucrative contracts to SpaceX and Starlink (even as Don, Jr. invested $50 million in Elon's companies).
Declawed the FAA's commercial spaceflight office that was investigating Musk's unsafe and failed rocket launches.
Accelerated NASA's plans to launch rockets to Mars—diverting taxpayer dollars that could have paid for school lunches or Alzheimer's research in order to nationalize Musk's personal dream of colonizing the Red Planet.
Allowed Musk to gain access to sensitive (and potentially priceless) government data.

While any of these shocking examples of corruption would have been major scandals in prior administrations, they pale in comparison to the latest revelations about the Mump Regime's kleptocratic machinations.

Invest in Starlink, get tariff relief!

This week, The Washington Post revealed that Secretary of State Rubio is offering "tariff relief" to countries that invest in Musk's Starlink service.

Lesotho was the first country to get shaken down:

It was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly 2 million people awarded Musk’s firm the nation’s first-ever satellite internet service license, slated to last for 10 years.

Documents obtained by The Post reveal that Rubio is personally involved in hawking Starlink on behalf of Musk to countries seeking trade deals with the most corrupt US administration in history:

A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name. The documents... indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm at a moment when the White House is calling for wide-ranging talks on trade.

And the plan is working. According to The Post, Starlink has:

Reached distribution deals with two providers in India in March and has won at least partial accommodations with Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Vietnam, although this is probably not a comprehensive count.

"Shouldn't this be a bigger story?!?" asked Jim Acosta on Bluesky while sharing a video clip in which Democratic Senator Mark Warner describes the Bangladeshi trade representative being taken out of one White House tariff meeting and led down the hall to meet Elon Musk, "where they supposedly had to call the Bangladeshi president and say. 'You want to get tariff relief? You've got to look at Starlink.'"

Shouldn’t this be a bigger story?!? Senator Mark Warner calls for probe into report that WH is pressuring countries to use Musk’s Starlink company in exchange for tariff relief. Watch: open.substack.com/pub/jimacost...
— Jim Acosta (@jimacosta.bsky.social) 2025-05-05T22:53:02.050Z

It's no surprise that the corruption in the new Trump era is off the charts.

The Mump Regime flouts the Constitution and mocks the rule of law with the full complicity of the Republican Party.

All the warnings about Trump becoming Musk's marionette have turned out to be true.

America has become a kleptocracy.

And, as Scott Galloway told Anderson Cooper on CNN this week, "the definition of a kleptocracy is that a small number of people with proximity to power make an exceptional amount of money, but the larger public loses a lot of money."

Consumers are nervous. Shortages are looming. Small business owners are panicking. Millions of jobs hang in the balance.

Trump, in other words, is "sticking it to the little guy," just like Marco Rubio told us he does. "Friends do not let friends vote for con artists," Rubio warned voters in 2016.

Sadly, in 2025, Rubio is not going to save anyone. America's fakest "Christian" has gone to the dark side.

Today, Rubio is helping Trump the con artist and Musk the tech fascist pull off the biggest grift in modern history.

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*UPDATE: The story of Elon Musk's depraved attitude toward the health of the poor communities forced to breathe the toxic fumes from dozens of unpermitted methane generators around xAI's "anti-woke" supercomputer in Memphis got new coverage in recent days with a major article in The New Yorker by Bill McKibben and a detailed discussion on "The Sunday Show" podcast from Tech Policy Press. Links below.

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